Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Words without consonants

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was No consensus. Despite the number of comments, arguments on both sides were rather weak. A significant number of the keep vote were based on the article being "useful" and/or "popular", which are both weak reasons to keep at best. Several people suggested the vowels article should be deleted in part because it was conflating two topics, but that is a reason to edit or split, not a reason to delete. (Generally these people felt neither topic was notable, so this wasn't their only reason.) Most of the remaining comments on both sides focused on debating whether the articles' topics were of scholarly interest or not. While relevant for the content of the articles, this is not the standard for notability in Wikipedia terms.

Finally, there was the issue of original research. This was the most significant concern and a valid reason to (potential) delete. However, I do not feel that a consensus was established that the article(s) consisted solely of unsalvageable OR. Taking all this into account, I can only close the AfD one way - no consensus. I strongly encourage those who want to "save" this material to improve the articles ASAP and/or to transfer anything that is a mere list of words to Wiktionary where is probably better suited. --ThaddeusB (talk) 00:35, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Words without consonants[edit]

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Words without vowels was deleted via prod for lack of sourcing and dubious notability. This article has the same problems and the same utter lack of sources — I couldn't find anything discussing this in depth. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 00:45, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Both articles ("Words without consonants" and "Words without vowels") are both interesting and useful to me. I would like to see this article kept, and the other article restored. Also, I would like any lack of sources to be remedied. —Wavelength (talk) 00:54, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Objection "interesting and useful to me" is a prohibited WP:ILIKEIT argument. Ipsign (talk) 10:17, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. This seems like the perfect case for WP:IAR to waive WP:NOR as this article's content is useful information (for anyone looking for or interested in words without consonants) and is inherently verifiable. Besides, there are sources for such information - just because the article does not (yet) cite them is no reason to delete. What is the harm in keeping it? I see only benefits.
I've requested that Words without vowels be undeleted accordingly[1]. --Born2cycle (talk) 00:57, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- I also note that the page gets at least 1,000 hits per month, sometimes over 2,000. --Born2cycle (talk) 01:04, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Not a valid argument against WP:OR; OTOH, it would be helpful if you could provide references (which you've mentioned in your post above) instead. Ipsign (talk) 10:15, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- You really think WP:NOR can be waived? What planet are you from? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 01:25, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - I'm from Planet Wikipedia where Ignore ALL rules is one of five pillars, which states:
  - If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it
  - In this case WP:NOR prevents us from "improving or maintaining Wikipedia" - so we're supposed to ignore it. At least on Planet Wikipedia. What planet are you from? --Born2cycle (talk) 02:11, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - Argument "[something] prevents us from improving or maintaining Wikipedia" can be brought into absolutely any discussion, that's why WP:IAR arguments are traditionally treated with a very big pinch of salt. Ipsign (talk) 10:15, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Wikipedia is not a dictionary or a depository for lists of non-notable information. There are other places and wiki sites available for this sort of thing. Popularity of pages is not a criteria for keeping non-notable WP articles. Sionk (talk) 01:32, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete – Like "words that begin with the letter X," his article's content is more appropriately a category listing at Wiktionary than an article at Wikipedia. There's nothing special about words without consonants or vowels; it's just a random collection of funny words at best. The topic is certainly not WP:N in any way, and presents only WP:OR. WP:ILIKEIT is a good indicator that just because some might find it strange, interesting, or entertaining doesn't mean it's encyclopedic. Compare the much more clearly academic topic of click consonants. I'm from outer space, but I know WP:NOR is not a waivable offense in Wiki County. JFHJr (㊟) 01:44, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - articles of a linguistic nature are just as encyclopedic as any others. And comparative linguistics is indeed of scholarly interest. - jc37 02:33, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- So prove it. The assertion on Talk:Words without vowels#A Mess is that scholars do not consider the notion to be a topic, because it is wrongheaded in its fundamental concepts of words and its conflations of written and spoken language and phonemes and letters. If you want to prove otherwise, show the world sources by linguists that indeed do cover this topic. A mere handwave isn't enough at AFD. This is money-where-one's-mouth-is time. What and where are these linguistic scholarly sources? My searches haven't turned up anything beyond Scrabble playing guides, yet.Uncle G (talk) 13:36, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Seriously? well first, we have an article on the subject: Comparative linguistics. (We also have Contrastive linguistics, for that matter...) To give some overview about the idea, I spent less than 5 minutes doing a quick search and came up with the following: here's an educational link: [2]; Here's something interesting: [[3]]. This is an interesting work on the subject [4]. Basically, the looking at the written language as representing certain sounds of the spoken language, and comparing the various aspects of it. Incidentally, that this article is nowhere near complete is not a good reason to delete it I would think, and to me seems rather contrary to the "wiki-way". - jc37 20:38, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - Yes, seriously. You should not be surprised to be held to the expected standard here at Wikipedia of showing that sources document a subject. Nor should you present straw men by misrepresenting an assertion that this is not a topic studied by scholars as "this article is nowhere near complete".
      This isn't comparative linguistics, note. You've got that wrong. It's logology. And your purported sources don't even discuss the subject, possibly because of that error. One's just a vague hand-wave at a book, with no clue as to chapter or page number. One's a treatise on reconstruction of roots in Proto-Indo-European that has nothing to do with the subject at hand here. And one's a list of speakers at a conference that hasn't even happened, for goodness' sake.
      Claiming to have found sources in five minutes only works when the sources that one points to actually turn out, upon reading, have any relevance whatsoever. It looks rather silly when they don't at all, and one of them isn't even a source. At least I found the Scrabble lists …. Uncle G (talk) 21:42, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      - Rofl. I have to admit you made me chuckle due to the tone of your response : ) - Anyway, sorry I wasn't more specific in what I was referencing or why. Your first comment (reprising an assertion on the talk page) was what I was directly responding to. As I had read it, you made it appear that your feeling about comparative linguistics was: "that scholars do not consider the notion to be a topic, because it is wrongheaded in its fundamental concepts of words and its conflations of written and spoken language and phonemes and letters." - And that would seem countered by the links I provided. First, showing how letter usage differs over time and over language (among other things), not to mention how these items are compared (pater/pitar etc.); then showing that this isn't something that scholars disdain, by showing the upcoming conference; and the book has some excellent information, I was looking over the back sections of the book in particular. The point I was making is that this is just one way in which words can be studied in this way. There are MANY. Incidentally, while a logologist (if there is such a person) may also find the information study-worthy, that doesn't make it any less worthy of an historical linguist. - jc37 22:09, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        After typing the above, did another quick search [[5] (pdf) and [6] (google books) - while noting they're not about English, they do show that the topic is scholarly. And here's another conference (just for you : ) - [7] - Enjoy : ) - jc37 22:19, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        
        I thought that it was clear from my pointing to the talk page discussion that it was the subject(s) at hand that Maunus was asserting wasn't a subject studied by scholars. It certainly wouldn't have been relevant to the discussion had I been asking you to demonstrate with sources that comparative linguistics was. The challenge, just to make it abundantly clear, is to demonstrate, with sources, the assertion that these subjects at hand have been a topic of scholarly study.
        Again, you've missed the mark, though, although you're a lot closer. Two sources dealing in phonetics, one about words without vowels and one about nasalization, don't deal at all in the logology of words without consonants. (It's a shame that this is a bulk nomination of multiple articles, since the two purported subjects are not equivalent, despite the articles at hand making them look so.) Uncle G (talk) 21:07, 25 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:46, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:46, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I have added Words without vowels since it was undeleted and I'm treating it as a contested prod. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 03:24, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - The lack of sources makes this a clear case of WP:OR. And while lists like these can be interesting, there's really nothing inherently notable about the information presented in them. Trivial information just doesn't belong in an encyclopedic setting without a clear cut reason as to its notability. Rorshacma (talk) 08:36, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - unambiguous WP:OR, also WP:NOTDICT. Ipsign (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - certainly OR. As above, Wikipedia is NOT a DICTIONARY. Basically just trivia, not in any sense academic comparative linguistics; and ILIKEIT isn't a reason. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:07, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete – non-notable and OR. The languages treated are only a minute fraction of the many natural languages that have one or more vowels-only words; the selection presented is completely arbitrary. From an encyclopedic point of view there is nothing of interest to say about these words beyond the fact that they are vowels only. --Lambiam 19:07, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. This is a situation in which it's quite easy to attribute information to reliable, published sources. Do you believe that there are no reliable dictionaries that include this kind of content? Plus, you'll observe from the references list that one non-dictionary source covers the no-consonants article, and a quick JSTOR search revealed this article, which examines the linguistic aspects of a no-vowels word. On top of all that, you have the fact that original research doesn't include things that are extremely obvious, such as mathematical equations, and the spelling of a word is no less obvious than mathematical equations. Finally, while IAR is to be used carefully, the idea (given above) that it cannot be ignored is blatantly at variance with this core policy; arguments that completely deny its applicability are far from being founded in policy. Nyttend (talk) 04:34, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Article? It is a book (ISBN 0-8248-2932-8), a translation into English of Otto Dempwolff's Grammatik der Jabêm-Sprache auf Neuguinea from 1939. This example is also a case in point. Thousands of human languages have been described, most of which have vowel-only words. Is there any argument to treat Jabêm in the article, and not Achagua, Beja, Chuukese, et cetera? If there are reliable sources that discuss words without consonants in general, we can base an encyclopedic article on these sources. But an article consisting of randomly composed lists of vowel-only words from a totally arbitrary selection of languages, with no hope of ever covering more than a fraction of one percent, even if each individual entry is properly sourced, does not make sense, just like an article titled "Red-haired people" essentially consisting of lists of red-haired people would not make sense. --Lambiam 12:24, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - So what? We have a reliable source covering this topic for one language, and you admit that there are reliable sources covering it for other languages. This is an established phonological topic, and the fact that sources cover certain languages but not others is not a reason for deletion. Nyttend (talk) 12:23, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - Moreover, I can give you Hoard's paper (pages 59-72) from Syllables and Segments (1978 proceedings from the Languages Syllables Conference), or Kehrein and Golston's "A Prosodic Theory of Laryngeal Contrasts" from Phonology 21.3 (2004): 325-357, or Hall's "Cross-Linguistic Patterns of Vowel Intrusion" from Phonology 23.3 (2006): 387-429, or Ridouane's "Syllables without Vowels: Phonetic and Phonological Evidence from Tashlhiyt Berber" from Phonology 25.2 (2008): 321-359, or Bagemihl's "Syllable Structure in Bella Coola" from Linguistic Inquiry 22.4 (1991): 589-646. Hall discusses ways that languages cope with "illicit" syllables and words, such as ones without vowels. Bagemihl's article concentrates on the occurrence of consonant-only words in the Nuxálk language (note that our article on this language pays attention to this issue) K&G study words with seemingly impossible consonant-only strings from a wide range of languages (including Georgian, Berber, multiple Salishan languages), multiple Wakashan languages, and multiple Mon–Khmer languages). In a two-paragraph section, they cite 28 articles that deal with this topic, and they conclude the second paragraph with a statement of "Much of this literature will be familiar to linguists already." Would you like me to copy the citations for all twenty-eight of these articles? If linguists reading Phonology can be familiar with the subject, and if an article published in a reliable scholarly journal says that there is tons of coverage on the topic, how can you say that it's not been covered adequately enough for a Wikipedia article? We'd better call up the editors of Phonology or Linguistic Inquiry and tell them that they need to publish retractions for articles on subjects unworthy of scholarly study. Nyttend (talk) 13:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      - Nyttend, those papers do not treat the topic of the article - they treat the topic of whether it is possible to have words without vowel sounds - the list includes only words without vowel letters - it is about orthography not phonology. Furthermore if it as about the topic you propose it wouldn't be a list but an actual article summarising this research. It would make no sense to make a list of th examples used in those articles. The discussion of this literatur would be very useful to include in th article on vowel because it is basically a scholarly discussion about how to define a vowel. But it really has nothing to do with the topic of the "words with out vowels" list we are discussing .·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        Not so. The article covers both, since "vowel" is ambiguous. (Comment below.) — kwami (talk) 18:30, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        In that case my argument that the article does not have a clarly deimited topic stands and makes it run afoul of "not a indiscriminate collection of information".·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:24, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
        That may be an argument to narrow the scope or to split the article. — kwami (talk) 23:51, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
delete per my explanation of why the topic is nonsensical here. Also because wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information or a dictionary. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- This is actually a discriminate list. indiscriminate would be a list of something like: horse, 186721, the colour red, and zombie. - jc37 20:22, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - It would be if the defining criteria actually made it possibl to discriminate between words to be included and words not to be left out which it doesn't since every language and orthography defines different sounds as symbols as vowels or consonants. IF the list were to be discriminate it would have to be "English words without vowel letters" (which is actually the topic that it currently describes) or something equally restrictive.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:34, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - I agree that a rename ~~of both pages~~ would be a good idea for clarity. - jc37 20:40, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      - Renamed to English words without vowels. The consonants page however is more of a list, and covers more languages. These should probably not have been nominated together (well, they weren't, the vowels page was added after the fact...) - jc37 18:05, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Keep The Wiki contains enumerable lists of seemly less importance then this one. A quick Yahoo search presented several listings that lead to possible notability and secondary sources making the material "not" original research. Any number of dictionaries should easily provide verifiability. Though the Wiki is a scholarly tom, no age group has been clearly defined as its audience so for the young users of the Wiki I will vote to keep the article. --User:Warrior777 (talk) 23:15, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS aside, can you provide some of those listings? JFHJr (㊟) 23:27, 19 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Talk:Words_without_consonants#helpful_links Actually usable sources would need to be sought out by the authors of the article but I think those provided show they maybe more numerous then one might expect. --User:Warrior777 (talk) 21:28, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - I followed your link above to find...your post with a link to Tripod website? And an irrelevant Omniglot page on Welsh? Either you must be joking about using those as sources for "Words without consonants," or you haven't digested WP:RS (Tripod SPS) or WP:OR, since there's nothing of relevance you could glean directly from Omniglot (search for "vowel" or "consonant"). That leaves the sources provided by others (the article has two now), though you haven't pointed to a single reliable one that presents any sort of coverage of this topic. I hope you'll either base your vote on particular coverage or consider striking your vote. JFHJr (㊟) 21:58, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The words-w/o-vowels article conflates two topics, because both letters and sounds are called 'vowels' in English. I suppose we could split the article if we decided to keep it. No-vowel-letters is of perhaps trivial interest, though it has been enough to inspire poems without vowel letters. No-vowel-sounds is of theoretical interest, as mentioned above: how do you syllabify a word with no vowels? Does the concept of 'syllable' even apply? Some have argued, from the existence of such words in Wakashan etc, that it does not—and if it does not apply there, why assume that syllables always apply in words with vowels, or that other languages must necessarily have syllables? Not an easy thing to answer. Though of course those points could be merged into syllable.
Words w/o consonants: perhaps every language which allows V as a syllable (not all do) allows V-only words. That is of no interest. However, there is a minor point of interest re. hiatus and language pedagogy and the vowel sequences that are possible in languages like Hawaiian. Though of course that point could be merged into hiatus (linguistics). — kwami (talk) 18:25, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: It appears to me that anyone who posts a keep vote or makes a comment about a delete vote gets jumped on by a bunch of editors challenging everything he/she says, while delete votes are mostly untouched. If I have an opinion on this AfD (I don't) I would be reluctant to vote to keep it, knowing that I would be opening the floodgates of criticism. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:49, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- It's called discussion, and it's what we're supposed to do at AFD. This isn't an election. It isn't about votes. (Which is why it's completely superfluous to put "comment" in front of every paragraph.) If you cannot handle the idea that people who disagree will want to discuss your rationale for keeping, and challenge you to support it with sources that will convince them, but want to cast an unadorned vote and walk away without taking on the responsibility of supporting and justifying your opinion, then yes you probably won't enjoy the process. But it's not the ideas that discussion should happen, that people be challenged to show scholarly support for claims, and that people should state what effort they put into looking and where they looked when they claimed not to find scholarly support, that is wrong. Uncle G (talk) 21:18, 25 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Transwiki to Wiktionary. Keep the work, just move it to the project where it belongs. Wiktionary's Category:appendices has other pages along these lines, like wikt:Appendix:Palindromic words. – Fayenatic L (talk) 17:32, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- I have de-prodded the linked page List of words that comprise a single sound, which was nominated at the same time as this one, and tagged it for transwiki to Wiktionary. – Fayenatic L (talk) 17:40, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.